Most prominent among the myths is that the napalm was dropped by U.S. forces — a claim the Los Angeles Times repeated in a profile in August about Nick Ut of the Associated Press, who took the photograph on June 8, 1972. The profile described how “Ut stood on a road in a village just outside of Saigon when he spotted the girl — naked, scorched by American napalm and screaming as she ran.”

Shortly after Media Myth Alert called attention to the erroneous reference to “American napalm,” the Times quietly removed the modifier “American” — but without appending a correction.

The notion of American responsibility for the napalm attack took hold in the months afterward, propelled by George McGovern, the hapless Democratic candidate for president in 1972. McGovern referred to the image during his campaign, saying the napalm had been “dropped in the name of America.”

That metaphoric claim was “plainly overstated,” I write, adding:

“The napalm was dropped on civilians ‘not in the name of America’ but in an errant attempt by South Vietnamese forces to roust North Vietnamese troops from bunkers dug at the outskirts of the village. That is quite clear from contemporaneous news reports.”

The Los Angeles Times placed the “napalm girl” photograph on its front page of June 9, 1972 (see nearby); the caption made clear that the napalm had been “dropped accidentally by South Vietnamese planes.”

So why does it matter to debunk the myths of the “Napalm Girl”?

The reasons are several.

“Excising the myths … allows the image to be regarded and assessed more fairly, on its own terms,” I write in Getting It Wrong. “Debunking the myths of ‘Napalm Girl’ does nothing to diminish the photograph’s exceptionality. But removing the barnacles of myth effectively frees the photograph from association with feats and effects that are quite implausible.” That’s a reference to other myths of the “Napalm Girl,” that the image was so powerful that it swung public opinion against the war and hastened an end to the conflict.

But like the notion of American culpability in the errant attack, those claims are distortions and untrue.

The obituary said that the Times, “at the request of the Kennedy administration, withheld some” details of the invasion plans, “including information that an attack was imminent.”

But as I describe in Getting It Wrong, the notion that the administration of President John F. Kennedy “asked or persuaded the Times to suppress, hold back, or dilute any of its reports about the impending Bay of Pigs invasion is utter fancy.”

What I call the “New York Times-Bay of Pigs suppression myth” centers around the editing of a single article by Tad Szulc, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Times. Eleven days before the invasion, Szulc reported from Miami that an assault, organized by the CIA, was imminent.

And the then-managing editor, Turner Catledge, later wrote that he “was hesitant to specify the CIA when we might not be able to document the charge.” So references to CIA were replaced with the more nebulous term “U.S. officials.”

Both decisions were certainly justifiable. And Szulc’s story appeared April 7, 1961, above-the-fold on the Times front page (see image nearby).

As the veteran Timesman Harrison Salisbury wrote in Without Fear or Favor, his insider’s account of the Times:

“The government in April 1961 did not … know that The Times was going to publish the Szulc story, although it was aware that The Times and other newsmen were probing in Miami. … The action which The Times took [in editing Szulc’s report] was on its own responsibility,” the result of internal discussions and deliberations that are recognizable to anyone familiar with the give-and-take of newsroom decision-making.

What’s rarely recognized or considered in asserting the suppression myth is that the Times’ reporting about the runup to the invasion was hardly confined to Szulc’s article.

Indeed, the Times and other news outlets “kept expanding the realm of what was publicly known about a coming assault against Castro,” I write, noting that the newspaper “continued to cover and comment on invasion preparations until the Cuban exiles hit the beaches at the Bay of Pigs” on April 17, 1961.

Bennis did so in late April, in an appearance on the MSNBC program, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.

Trump during his campaign vowed to eradicate ISIS, the radical Islamic State, but wasn’t specific about how that would be accomplished.

Bennis, showing unconcealed smugness, declared on the MSNBC show that Trump’s reference to ISIS “was very reminiscent of Nixon’s call when he was running for president [in 1968] and said, ‘I have a secret plan to end the war.’ The secret plan of course turned out to be escalation.”

He didn’t campaign for the presidency by espousing or touting or proclaiming a “secret plan” on Vietnam.

That much is clear from the search results of a full-text database of leading U.S. newspapers in 1968, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. The search terms “Nixon” and “secret plan” returned no articles during the period from January 1, 1967, to January 1, 1969, in which Nixon was quoted as saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. (The search period included all of Nixon’s presidential campaign and its immediate aftermath.)

Surely, if Nixon had campaigned on a “secret plan” in 1968, as Bennis so snootily claimed, the country’s leading newspapers would have publicized it.

Nixon did publicly confront the notion he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. In an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times, he was quoted as saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

Nixon also said on that occasion:

“If I had any way to end the war, I would pass it on to President [Lyndon] Johnson.” (Nixon’s remarks were made just a few days before Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.)

Nixon may or may not have had a “secret plan” in mind in 1968. But such a claim was not a feature of his campaign.

Confirmation of its zombie-like character was in effect offered by Politicoin December, in an essay about the “long and brutal history of fake news.” Politico cited, as if it were true, the fake tale of Hearst’s “furnish the war” vow.

As I wrote in a Media Myth Alert post about Politico‘s use of the mythical quote:

“Hearst’s vow, supposedly contained in an exchanged of telegrams with the artist Frederick Remington, is one of the most tenacious of all media myths, those dubious tales about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal. They can be thought of as prominent cases of ‘fake news‘ that have masqueraded as fact for years.”

The tale, I write in Getting It Wrong, “lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation.

“It lives on even though telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up. It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.”

And it lives on despite what I call “an irreconcilable internal inconsistency.” That is, it would have been illogical for Hearst to have sent a message vowing to “furnish the war” because war — Cuba’s rebellion against Spanish colonial rule, begun in 1895 — was the very reason Hearst assigned Remington to Cuba at the end of 1896.

Debunking the Hearstian vow is the subject of Chapter One in Getting It Wrong; the chapter is accessible here.

The dominant narrative (the heroic-journalist trope, I call it) emerged long ago, and Hollywood — specifically, the cinematic version of Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting — is an important reason why.

I point out in Getting It Wrong that All the President’s Men “allows no other interpretation: It was the work Woodward and Bernstein that set in motion far-reaching effects that brought about the first-ever resignation of a U.S. president. And it is a message that has endured” — as was suggested by a New York Times in an article in early January.

The article, which appeared beneath the headline “Journalism Catches Hollywood’s Eye,” embraced the heroic-journalist myth in referring to “the investigation by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that led to Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.”

Their reporting had no such effect, however much All the President’s Men encouraged that simple notion.

I point out in Getting It Wrong that rolling up a scandal of Watergate’s dimensions “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the burglary in June 1972 that was Watergate’s seminal crime.

It’s notable that principals at the Post declined over the years to embrace the mediacentric interpretation.

Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during Watergate, said in 1997, for example:

“Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do. The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

In 2005, Michael Getler, then the Post’s ombudsman, or in-house critic, wrote:

“Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration. They saw Watergate and the attempt to cover it up as a vast abuse of power and attempted corruption of U.S. institutions.”

The January article was not the first occasion in which the Times treated the heroic-journalist myth as if it were true.

In an article in 2008 about Woodward’s finally introducing Bernstein to the high-level Watergate source code-named “Deep Throat,” the Times referred to the “two young Washington Post reporters [who] cracked the Watergate scandal and brought down President Richard M. Nixon.”

In a lengthy essay posted today, Politico considers what it called the “long and brutal history of fake news” — and offers up, as if it were true, the fake tale of William Randolph Hearst’s vowing to “furnish the war” with Spain.

Hearst’s vow, supposedly contained in an exchanged of telegrams with the artist Frederick Remington, is one of the most tenacious of all media myths, those dubious tales about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal. They can be thought of as prominent cases of “fake news” that have masqueraded as fact for years.

“In the 1890s, plutocrats like Randolph Hearst and his Morning Journal used exaggeration to help spark the Spanish-American War. When Hearst’s correspondent in Havanawired that there would be no war, Hearst — the inspiration for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane — famously responded: ‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.’ Hearst published fake drawings of Cuban officials strip-searching American women — and he got his war.”

Lots of myth to unpack in that passage.

Let’s start with the unsourced reference to Hearst’s “furnish the war” vow.

As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong (an expanded second edition of which came out not long ago), “the anecdote lives on despite a nearly complete absence of supporting documentation.

“It lives on even though telegrams supposedly exchanged by Remington and Hearst have never turned up. It lives on even though Hearst denied ever sending such a message.”

And it lives on despite what I call “an irreconcilable internal inconsistency.” That is, it would have been illogical for Hearst to have sent a message vowing to “furnish the war” because war — specifically, Cuba’s rebellion against Spanish colonial rule — was the very reason Hearst sent Remington to Cuba in the first place.

Not only that, but it’s extremely unlikely that Hearst’s purported telegram would have reached Remington without being intercepted by Spanish authorities.

They controlled all incoming and outgoing telegraphic traffic and their oversight, I write in Getting It Wrong, was “too vigilant and severe to have allowed such an exchange to have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon.”

I further point out that an incendiary message such as a vow to “furnish the war” surely would have been intercepted and publicized by Spanish authorities as a clear-cut example of Yankee meddling in Cuba.

Remington’s assignment in Cuba was to draw sketches of the rebellion which, by then, had reached islandwide proportions. Spain had sent as many as 200,000 troops to Cuba in a futile attempt to put down the conflict. Remington arrived in early January 1897 and stayed six days.

He apparently never spoke publicly about the purported telegraphic exchange with Hearst. Even so, the artist’s work and recollections of the assignment belie the notion that he had found Cuba undisturbed by conflict.

Remington: Brief trip to Cuba gave rise to media myth

His sketches published in Hearst’s New York Journal depict unmistakable, if unremarkable, scenes of rebellion — a scouting party of Spanish cavalry with rifles at the ready; a cluster of Cuban noncombatants trussed and bound and being herded into Spanish lines; a scruffy Cuban rebel kneeling to fire at a small Spanish fort; a knot of Spanish soldiers dressing a comrade’s leg wound.

Accompanying the sketch of the captive noncombatants was a caption in which Remington said the treatment of Cuban women by irregulars allied with the Spanish was nothing short of “unspeakable.” And “as for the men captured by them alive,” Remington’s caption said, “the blood curdles in my veins as I think of the atrocity, the cruelty, practiced on these helpless victims.”

In 1899, Remington recalled the assignment to Cuba in a short magazine article in which he wrote:

“I saw ill-clad, ill-fed Spanish soldiers bring their dead and wounded into” Havana, “dragging slowly along in ragged columns. I saw scarred Cubans with their arms bound stiffly behind them being marched to the Cabanas,” a grim fortress overlooking the Havana harbor. The countryside, Remington wrote, “was a pall of smoke” from homes of Cubans that had been set afire.

Clearly, the artist had seen a good deal of war-related misery and disruption during his brief visit to Cuba.

The trip’s immediate aftermath proved controversial and embarrassing to Remington. After returning to New York, he drew an imaginative and highly inaccurate sketch of leering Spanish authorities conducting a strip-search of a young Cuban woman aboard an American passenger vessel before it left Havana.

Remington’s sketch was drawn to accompany a report by Richard Harding Davis, a flashy correspondent who had accompanied the artist to Cuba and stayed on for a few weeks.

Davis’ article — which condemned the search and suggested, erroneously, that it was illegal on an American-flagged vessel in Cuban waters — was published on the Journal’s front page in February 1897. Remington’s accompanying strip-search sketch (see nearby) was displayed on page 2. It erred in showing men conducting the search; it was carried out by a woman.

Presumably, this sketch is what Politico referred to in stating:

“Hearst published fake drawings of Cuban officials strip-searching American women — and he got his war.”

The subject of the search was a Cuban woman. And the sketch, while exaggerated, had nothing to do with the onset of the Spanish-American War in April 1898.

Claims that Hearst brought about the war, I wrote, “often rest on the selective use of evidence, and tend to ignore more relevant and immediate factors that give rise to armed conflict.”

In 1898, those factors centered around a diplomatic impasse between the United States and Spain over Spanish rule of Cuba, the scene of rebellion since early 1895.

In trying to put down the rebellion, Spain not only had sent thousands of troops to the island, it imposed a cruel policy called “reconcentration,” which forcibly removed thousands of Cubans — mostly old men, women, and children — into garrison towns where they could offer neither support nor supplies to the Cuban rebels.

Spain’s “reconcentration” policy gave rise to malnutrition and disease: Thousands of Cuban non-combatants died from illness and starvation.

The humanitarian disaster on Cuba “inevitably stirred outrage and condemnation in the United States,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism. The desperate conditions on Cuba were in 1897 and early 1898 a frequent topic of reporting in the American press — including, but certainly not limited to, Hearst’s newspapers in New York and San Francisco.

The Hearst press reported on, but did not create, the deplorable effects of Spain’s “reconcentration” policy.

In the end, the humanitarian crisis on Cuba, and Spain’s inability to resolve the crisis, weighed decisively in the U.S. decision to go to war in April 1898 — a decision that had little to do with Hearst, Remington, or the content of the New York Journal.

“Pictures of war and suffering have pricked the public conscience and provoked action before. … There was Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph from South Vietnam of the naked 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, screaming, burned by napalm. These pictures drove news cycles for weeks, months, years, helping tip the scales of policy.”

The photograph, which showed a cluster of terror-stricken children fleeing an errant napalm attack on their village northwest of what was then called Saigon, provoked no prolonged conversation in the American press in the days following its publication. It prompted few newspaper editorials.

There’s no evidence, moreover, that “Napalm Girl” helped “tip the scales of policy.” (The essay in the Times cited none.)

“Over the years,” I write in Getting It Wrong, “the superlatives associated with the image have edged into hyperbole and exaggeration. Napalm Girl has become invested with mythic qualities and a power that no photograph, however distinctive and exceptional, can project.”

Among the myths is that “Napalm Girl” was so arresting and extraordinary that it appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States. I present data challenging that notion, reporting in Getting It Wrong that of 40 major U.S. dailies examined, 21 placed the photograph on the front page in the days soon after it was taken on June 8, 1972.

But 19 newspapers examined either did not publish “Napalm Girl” or placed the photograph on an inside page.

Reservations about front nudity no doubt led some newspapers to decline to publish “Napalm Girl” or give it prominence, I note, although the depth of such reluctance is difficult to measure.

In any event, it is clear that “Napalm Girl” did not drive “news cycles for weeks, months, years,” as the Times’ essay asserted.

Nor did the image drive policy.

It had no discernible effect on the U.S. policy of Vietnamization, which was put in place during the presidency of Richard Nixon and sought to shift the bulk of fighting to America’s South Vietnamese allies.

By June 1972, most American combat troops had been removed from South Vietnam, a drawdown neither slowed nor accelerated by publication of “Napalm Girl.”

The book addresses and debunks media-driven myths, which are well-known stories about and/or by the news media that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as false or wildly exaggerated.

Media myths can be thought of as prominent cases of “fake news” or shoddy interpretation that have masqueraded as fact for years. Or decades.

Take, for example, the often-told tale that television viewers and radio listeners had sharply different impressions about who won the first-ever televised debate in September 1960 between major party candidates. The media myth is that John F. Kennedy looked so cool and collected that TV audiences gave him the nod, but that Richard Nixon was the winner among radio listeners.

The tale of viewer-listener disagreement has circulated for years and is dismantled in one of three new chapters in the second edition of Getting It Wrong. “Despite a feeble base of supporting documentation,” I write, “it is a robust trope that emerged within months of the first of four Kennedy-Nixon debates [in 1960] and is often invoked decades later as conclusive evidence of the power of television images and the triumph of image over substance.”

Viewer-listener disagreement is a dubious bit of political lore that’s frequently cited by mainstream media, especially in the runup to national elections. As with many media myths, I point out in the book, “the notion of viewer-listener disagreement rests more on assertion than persuasive evidence.”

What little polling data exist about the debate’s radio listeners are simply too sparse, too unstable, and too imprecise to support any broad conclusions about their views of the debate winner.

Moreover, the extensive debate coverage in major U.S. newspapers lends no support to the claim of viewer-listener disagreement, either.

Had dramatic and widespread differences characterized the reactions of TV and radio audiences, journalists in 1960 were well-positioned to detect and report about such clashing perceptions — especially in the days immediately after the Kennedy-Nixon encounter when curiosity about the debate, its novelty, and its impact ran high.

But none of the scores of newspaper articles, editorials, and commentaries I examined in researching the chapter about the debate made specific reference to the presumptive phenomenon of listener-viewer disagreement: Leading American newspapers contained nothing in the debate’s immediate aftermath that suggested pervasive differences in how televisions viewers and radio listeners reacted to the landmark debate, I note.

The myth of viewer-listener disagreement appears to have originated in a passage in The Making of the President, 1960, an award-winning book about the campaign written by journalist Theodore White.

The purported vow of William Randolph Hearst to “furnish the war” with Spain, supposedly contained in a telegraphic exchange with Frederic Remington, an artist on assignment in Cuba in 1897 for Hearst’s New York Journal. The war-mongering vow is well-known in American journalism, but is supported by no compelling evidence or documentation. The telegrams have never turned up and Hearst denied sending such a message. But because it supposedly captures Hearst’s duplicitous ways so well, the “furnish the war” anecdote lives on, despite having been thoroughly debunked.

The radio adaptation in October 1938 of The War of The Worlds was supposedly so dramatic and sounded so convincing that tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets in panic and mass hysteria, believing that Earth was under an invasion from Mars. But evidence is scant at best that the radio program caused such powerful effects. If panic had spread across America during The War of the Worlds broadcast, the resulting turmoil surely would have resulted in deaths, including suicides, and in serious injuries. But nothing of the sort was linked to the show.
This tale, too, lives on, resistant to debunking.

The supposed battlefield heroics of PFC Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old Army supply clerk who, the Washington Post said, fought fiercely in the ambush of her unit during the early days of the Iraq War in 2003. Lynch, the Post claimed, was shot and stabbed, but kept firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition and was taken prisoner. The Post’s electrifying, front-page story about Lynch’s derring-do carried the headline “‘She was fighting to the death'” and was picked up and amplified by news organizations around the world.
But the story soon was found to be wrong in all important respects: Lynch never fired a shot during the ambush (her weapon had jammed) and she was neither shot nor stabbed. The heroics attributed to her were an apparent case of mistaken identity that likely stemmed from a translation error. The Post, however, never has adequately explained how it got it so badly wrong about Jessica Lynch. Or who its sources were.

The Post figures in an even more prominent media myth — namely that the reporting of two of its reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, uncovered the Watergate scandal and exposed the wrongdoing that brought down Nixon’s presidency in 1974. This simplistic, easy-to-remember yet misleading version of Watergate has become the scandal’s dominant narrative.

But clearly, that’s not how Watergate was uncovered. Unspooling the scandal was the work of subpoena-wielding agencies and actors, including federal special prosecutors, congressional committees, the FBI, and ultimately the Supreme Court.

Even then, Nixon probably would have survived the scandal if not for the secret audio tapes he had made of conversations at the White House. The tapes clearly revealed his guilty role in approving a cover-up of Watergate’s seminal crime — the burglary in June 1972 of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington.

Mainstream media have been beside themselves of late, lamenting and fretting about a supposed surge of “fake news,” in which dubious tales circulated online pollute and corrupt popular discourse.

Not to blame: The yellow press and war with Spain

In their hand-wringing assessments, news outlets also have stirred up references to hoary media-driven myths, which can be thought of as variants of fake news, only more prominent and entrenched. Despite their thorough debunking, media myths often are recited as if they were true.

As I discuss in my mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, media myths are memorable tales about and/or by the news that are widely believed and often retold but which, under scrutiny, dissolve as apocryphal or wildly exaggerated.

For an example of a news outlet stirring up a media myth while ruminating about “fake news,” consider the essay published the other day in the Washington Times. “Fake news,” it declared, is nothing new.

Sure enough. But the essay soon dialed up a media myth, declaring:

“Candidates for public office routinely make statements divorced from truth. Was it ‘fake’ news for 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon to maintain he had a ‘secret plan’ to end the Vietnam War when he had no such thing?”

But Nixon made no such claim: He did not “maintain” or otherwise declare during his campaign in 1968 that he had such a plan.

In fact, candidate Nixon disavowed such a notion during the 1968 primary season. In an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times, Nixon was quoted as saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

“If I had any way to end the war,” he was further quoted as saying, “I would pass it on to President [Lyndon] Johnson.” (Nixon’s remarks were made just a few days before Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.)

Nixon in 1968 may or may not have had a “secret plan” in mind. But he did not make such a claim a plank or component of his campaign. That is clear in reviewing the search results of a full-text database of leading U.S. newspapers in 1968, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune.

The search terms “Nixon” and “secret plan” returned no articles during the period from January 1, 1967, to January 1, 1969, in which Nixon was quoted as touting or otherwise saying he had a “secret plan” for Vietnam. (The search period included the months of Nixon’s presidential campaign and its aftermath.)

Had Nixon made such a “secret plan” claim during the campaign, the country’s leading daily newspapers surely would have publicized it.

But despite the evidence that can be arrayed to debunk it, the notion that Nixon possessed a “secret plan” can be simply too delicious — and too Nixonian in its supposed duplicity — to resist retelling. As William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and columnist for the New York Times, once observed:

“Like the urban myth of crocodiles in the sewers, the non-quotation [about Nixon’s ‘secret plan’] never seems to go away ….”

Another tenacious media myth is that sensational yellow journalism forced the United States into war in 1898 over Spain’s rule of Cuba.

That dubious interpretation has long been rejected by serious historians of the period. But it was invoked the other day in an segment on Public Radio International’s “The World” program.

The show’s resident history authority, Christopher Woolf, claimed that sensational reporting in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal about the destruction of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898 fired up American public opinion which, in turn, prompted Congress to declare war on Spain in April 1898.

Essentially, the syllogism founders on the absence of evidence that Hearst’s Journal exerted decisive influence on public opinion, or on the administration of President William McKinley, in the run-up to war.

As I point out in Yellow Journalism, an impressive body of research had been compiled over the years, indicating that newspapers in small-town and rural America often scoffed at, condemned, or ignored the sometimes-exaggerated reports in New York’s yellow press — the newspapers of Hearst and his rival, Joseph Pulitzer — in the run-up to the war.

Rather than take their lead from Hearst’s Journal or Pulitzer’s World, many newspapers in the American heartland tended to reject their excesses.

Not only that, but top officials in the administration of President William McKinley largely disregarded the content of the Hearst and Pulitzer papers. Officials certainly didn’t turn to the yellow press for guidance in shaping policy.

“If the yellow press did foment the war,” I wrote in Yellow Journalism, “researchers should be able to find some hint of, some reference to, that influence in the personal papers and the reminiscences of policymakers of the time.

“But neither the diary entries of Cabinet officers nor the contemporaneous private exchanges among American diplomats indicate that the yellow newspapers exerted any influence at all. When it was discussed within the McKinley administration, the yellow press was dismissed as a nuisance or scoffed at as a complicating factor.”

The yellow press, as Lewis Gould, a political historian of the late nineteenth century observed, did not “create the real differences between the United States and Spain” that gave rise to war.

Those differences stemmed from Spain’s harsh and futile measures to put down a rebellion on Cuba that began in February 1895 — measures that gave rise to a humanitarian crisis on the island. Thousands of Cuban non-combattants — women, children, and old men — were herded into garrison towns in a policy the Spanish called “reconcentration.” The objective was to deprive the Cuban rebels of support of the citizenry; the upshot of the policy was that non-combattants suffered immensely from hunger and disease.

Far more than the content of Hearst’s Journal, the humanitarian crisis caused by reconcentration prompted the United States to go to war with Spain in 1898.

But of course, it’s more delicious, and simplistic, to blame the supposed war-mongering newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer.

The New York Timesobituary today about Fidel Castro not only praised the brutal Cuban dictator as “a towering international figure,” it stepped into the dogged media myth about its own coverage of the run-up to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

The obituary said that the Times, “at the request of the Kennedy administration, withheld some” details of it was planning to report about invasion plans, “including information that an attack was imminent.”

Not quite.

As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong — a second edition of which was published recently — the notion that the administration of President John F. Kennedy “asked or persuaded the Times to suppress, hold back, or dilute any of its reports about the impending Bay of Pigs invasion is utter fancy.

“There is no evidence that Kennedy or his administration knew in advance about the Times report of April 7, 1961, a front-page article [see nearby] that lies at the heart of this media myth.”

The article was written by Tad Szulc, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Times, and filed from Miami on the afternoon of April 6, 1961 — 11 days before the CIA-backed assault on Cuba’s southern coast.

Kennedy, I point out, essentially had no opportunity to speak with Times officials between the time when Szulc’s story was received at the Times building in midtown Manhattan and when it was set in type.

That’s because the president “spent the last half of the afternoon of April 6, 1961, playing host to Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, on a lengthy cruise down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon,” I note in Getting It Wrong. “They traveled aboard the Honey Fitz, a ninety-two-foot presidential yacht. The round trip from Washington on that chilled and windy afternoon lasted two hours and forty minutes.

“It was 6:25 p.m. when the yacht returned to an Army Engineers dock in Washington, at the end of the outing. Kennedy and Macmillan rode together to the White House, arriving at 6:28 p.m. … leaving only a very small window for Kennedy to have been in touch with Times executives before the first edition of the newspaper hit the streets.”

I further note that the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston has said that “White House telephone logs reveal no calls that were placed to senior Times officials on April 6, 1961.”

Had the writer of the Times obituary consulted Without Fear or Favor, an insider’s account by Harrison Salisbury, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Times assistant managing editor, he would have found an unequivocal assertion that Kennedy was unaware of Szulc’s dispatch before it was published.

Salisbury wrote:

“The government in April 1961 did not … know that The Times was going to publish the Szulc story although it was aware that The Times and other newsmen were probing in Miami. Nor did President Kennedy telephone [top Times officials] about the story…. The action which The Times took [in editing Szulc’s report] was on its own responsibility,” the result of internal discussions and deliberations.

Those discussions included Szulc’s characterization of the invasion as imminent. The reference was removed from the article — an entirely justifiable decision, especially, as it turned out, the invasion was not imminent.

“Most important,” Salisbury added, “The Times had not killed Szulc’s story. … The Times believed it was more important to publish than to withhold. Publish it did.”

In addition, I write in Getting It Wrong, the suppression myth myth about the Times and the Bay of Pigs “fails to recognize or acknowledge that the Times coverage was not confined to Szulc’s article” published 10 days before the invasion.

“It ignores that several follow-up stories and commentaries appeared in the Times during the run-up to the invasion. The Times did not abandon the Cuba-invasion story after April 7, 1961,” I note. “Far from it.

“Subsequent reporting in the Times, by Szulc and others, kept expanding the realm of what was publicly known about a coming assault against Castro.”

On April 8, 1961, the Times published a front-page article about the Cuban exiles and their eagerness to topple Castro. The article appeared beneath the headline “Castro Foe Says Uprising Is Near” and quoted the president of the U.S.-based umbrella group of exiles, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, as saying that a revolt against the Castro regime was “imminent.”

On April 9, 1961, the Times published another front-page article by Szulc that report how Cuban exile leaders were attempting to paper over rivalries and divisions in advance of what Szulc described as the coming “thrust against Premier Fidel Castro.” The “first assumption” of the leaders’ plans, Szulc wrote, “is that an invasion by a ‘liberation army,’ now in the final stages of training … will succeed with the aid of an internal uprising in Cuba. It is also assumed that a provisional ‘government in arms’ will be established promptly on the island.”

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, Szulc in those sentences effectively summarized the strategic objectives for what soon became the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Two days later, on April 11, James Reston, the Washington bureau chief, reported on the Times’s front page that Kennedy administration officials were divided “about how far to go in helping the Cuban refugees to overthrow the Castro Government.” Reston recounted in detail how Kennedy had been receiving conflicting counsel from advisers in the White House, the CIA, and the State and Defense departments. Reston also identified the time pressures facing Kennedy, writing:

“It is feared that unless something is done fairly soon nothing short of direct military intervention by United States forces will be enough to shake the Castro Government’s hold over the Cuban people.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong, the Times “continued to cover and comment on invasion preparations until the Cuban exiles hit the beaches at the Bay of Pigs.” Not all preinvasion reports were spot-on accurate. But the newspaper’s coverage of the run-up to the Bay of Pigs debacle was fairly extensive.

“Not only does the suppression myth ignore this,” I write, “it also fails to recognize that coverage of invasion preparations appeared in newspapers other than the New York Times.

“Indeed, the coverage reached a point where Kennedy, a week before the invasion, told his press secretary, Pierre Salinger: ‘I can’t believe what I’m reading! Castro doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers. It’s all laid out for him.'”

Amid the media’s self-flagellation and agonized introspection in the days since Donald Trump’s stunning election victory — days that brought such astonishing turns as the New York Times all but begging subscribers not to quit the newspaper — I have thought often of an ombudsman’s column published eight years ago, soon after Barack Obama won the presidency.

“I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

The column stuck with me not only because of Howell’s evident candor in describing conservatives in the newsroom — you could almost see them cowering — but because viewpoint diversity remains largely elusive in mainstream American journalism.

Howell was right in 2008, and her analysis rings true today: Leading U.S. news outlets have done little to address a failing that has been evident for years.

As John Kass, a conservative columnist for the Chicago Tribune wrote recently, “It’s no secret that most of American journalism is liberal in its politics. The diversity they prize has nothing to do with diversity of thought.”

The viewpoint-diversity deficit was highlighted anew in Trump’s electoral victory over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, an outcome that gave journalists what Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab called “the shock of their professional lives.”

The shock was of 1948 proportions, the year when President Harry S. Truman defied broad expectations that he would handily lose the election to Republican Thomas Dewey. This year, as Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight data blog observed, “most campaign coverage was premised on the idea that Clinton was all but certain to become the next president.”

The outcome revealed how inadequately journalists had prepared their audiences for a Trump victory.

Granted, the viewpoint-diversity deficit in leading American newsrooms hasn’t been much measured. As I note in my media mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong— an expanded second edition of which came out late last month — a survey in 2008 for the Washington-based Committee of Concerned Journalists found that 8 percent of national correspondents for U.S. news media considered themselves “conservative.” The overwhelming majority self-reported as “moderate” or “liberal.”

That such surveys have been rare is hardly reason to pretend the deficit is imaginary. Or that it can be justified by arguing, “Well, conservatives have Fox News,” the cable outlet.

Few media self-critiques following Trump’s victory were as brutally discerning — or as revealing of the viewpoint-diversity deficit — as the essay Will Rahn wrote for CBS News.

Rahn, managing director of political coverage for CBS News Digital, did not refer specifically to viewpoint diversity in his essay. But he said as much, writing:

“Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid. It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing.”

Rahn further wrote of journalists:

“We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover. … There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.”

The periodic Wikileaks disclosures during the fall campaign that revealed fawning interactions of journalists and the Clinton campaign further confirmed that the deficit in viewpoint diversity is no evanescent problem.

And it’s not of recent vintage.

Howell’s column in 2008 quoted Tom Rosenstiel, then the director of the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism as saying that “conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”

In this year’s election, journalists openly challenged or flouted professional norms of impartiality and detachment in reporting, saying the incendiary character of Trump’s views and remarks was so egregious that they were left with no choice.

Columbia Journalism Review fairly rejoiced in what it saw as a latter-day “Murrow Moment” for journalists, a reference to the mythical 1954 television program when Edward R. Murrow took on the red-baiting Republican senator, Joseph R. McCarthy.

The journalism review said “we … are witnessing a change from existing practice of steadfast detachment, and the context in which journalists are reacting is not unlike that of Murrow: The candidate’s comments fall outside acceptable societal norms, and critical journalists are not alone in speaking up.”

Powerful stuff. Except that the “Murrow Moment” is a false precedent.

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, Murrow took on McCarthy years after other journalists had directed pointed and sustained attention to the senator’s brutish tactics — and in some instances paid a price for having done so. McCarthy, I point out, had no more sustained or prominent critic in journalism than Drew Pearson of the nationally syndicated muckraking column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

Pearson first challenged McCarthy in February 1950, shortly after the senator began a campaign against communists in government, and persisted in questioning the validity of McCarthy’s accusations. That was four years before Murrow’s program.

Not only that, but McCarthy’s favorability rating had hit the skids before Murrow’s program aired on March 9, 1954.

So the “Murrow Moment” can’t be considered a high moment in American journalism.

It looks something like 1948 for mainstream American news media today.

Donald Trump’s stunning victory in yesterday’s presidential election brought reminders of the embarrassment of 1948, when Thomas Dewey, the presumptive favorite for the presidency, was upset by President Harry S. Truman, much to the shock of the American press.

In the weeks and months before yesterday’s election, prominent media analysts predicted Trump was going to lose, and probably decisively, to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Notable among these misplaced predictions was that of Stuart Rothenberg, who wrote on August 9 at the Washington Post’sPowerPost blog:

“Three months from now, with the 2016 presidential election in the rearview mirror, we will look back and agree that the presidential election was over on Aug. 9th.

“Of course,” he added, “it is politically incorrect to say that the die is cast. …

“But a dispassionate examination of the data, combined with a coldblooded look at the candidates, the campaigns and presidential elections, produces only one possible conclusion: Hillary Clinton will defeat Donald Trump in November, and the margin isn’t likely to be as close as Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney” in 2012.

Trump won at least 290 electoral votes yesterday; Clinton, at least 228. Four years ago, Obama defeated Romney by an electoral count of 332-206.

In another essay at PowerPost a few days before the election, Rothenberg asserted: “Partisan pollsters on both sides” agreed it was “very unlikely that Trump will sweep all of the toss-up states and pick off one or two Clinton-leaning states, which he would need to do to win.”

Trump essentially accomplished just that: He won toss-up states Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio, and flipped Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, both Democratic-leaning states where Clinton had been expected to win.

In a column published October 11, David Brooks of the New York Times ruminated about what he called “the essential loneliness of Donald Trump” and declared:

“On Nov. 9, the day after Trump loses, there won’t be solidarity and howls of outrage. Everyone will just walk away.”

Nate Silver, founder and editor of the widely followed Five Thirty Eight data-blog, wrote on October 20, the day after the third and final presidential debate of the campaign:

“I’m not sure I need to tell you this, but Hillary Clinton is probably going to be the next president. It’s just a question of what ‘probably’ means.”

Referring to Trump’s deficit of some seven percentage points in public opinion polling at that time, Silver declared:

“There aren’t really any direct precedents for a candidate coming back from this far down to win an American presidential election, although you can make a few loose analogies. Harry Truman’s comeback over Thomas Dewey in 1948 almost works as a comparison, but Truman wasn’t coming from as far behind as Trump is, and there was much less polling in 1948.”

New York magazine election cover

The Washington Postreported on October 20 that Trump’s performance at the third debate, at which he declined to say whether he would accept the election result, touched off a “wave of apprehension and anguish [that] swept the Republican Party … with many GOP leaders alarmed by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election and concluding that it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign.”

Such eagerness to declare the election over prompted a rebuke from Howard Kurtz, an analyst and media reporter for Fox News.

“The tenor of the coverage certainly suggests that Donald Trump has no hope and Hillary Clinton is coasting to victory,” Kurtz wrote in a commentary posted October 24 at the Fox News site.

Many pundits, Kurtz noted, “are now portraying the billionaire’s plight as Mission Impossible.”

He added, presciently:

“I’m always more cautious than that. I’ve seen too many elections where a candidate bounced back after being written off, the polls were off, or some unexpected event moved the needle.”

Such a development came 11 days before the election, when FBI Director James Comey announced the reopening of the agency’s investigation into Clinton’s use of private email while she was secretary of state. But then, two days before the election, Comey said Clinton should face no criminal charges.

The media prize for excessive self-confidence has to go to New York magazine: Its election issue cover featured a photograph of an angry Trump, a taunting sneer, “LOSER,” emblazoned across his face. The issue’s publication date was October 31.

Coinciding with the closing days of this year’s wretched election campaign has been the appearance of prominent media myths about the Watergate scandal and the first televised debate in 1960 between major party presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

The myths, respectively, have it that the dogged reporting by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the crimes that brought down Nixon’s presidency in 1974, and that television viewers and radio listeners reached sharply different conclusions about the debate outcome, signaling that image trumps substance.

Both myths have become well-entrenched dominant narratives over the years and they tend to be blithely invoked by contemporary journalists.

Take, for example, the lead paragraph of an Atlanticarticle posted a couple of days ago; it flatly declared:

“The Watergate Scandal was a high point of American journalism. Two dedicated young reporters from The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, brought down President Richard Nixon for his role in the coverup of the 1972 attempted break in of the Democratic Party headquarters by Republican operatives.”

In an otherwise thoughtful analysis posted today about the new media’s failings in this year presidential campaign, David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun invoked the Watergate myth, stating:

“And how was Nixon forced to resign if not through the old-school, legacy standards of dogged investigative journalism?”

Zurawik referred to Bernstein as “[o]ne of the journalistic elders who brought Nixon down.”

Unraveling a scandal of Watergate’s dimensions, I write in Getting It Wrong, “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then,” I add, “Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972, the seminal crime of Watergate.

Most senior figures at the Post during the Watergate period — including Woodward, Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, and Publisher Katharine Graham — scoffed at claims the newspaper’s reporting toppled Nixon.

Woodward, for example, told American Journalism Review in 2004:

“To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horse shit.”

The myth about the 1960 debate was invoked almost casually in a column the other day in Raleigh’s News & Observer newspaper. The writer asserted:

“The televised debates were said to give the nod to the telegenic Kennedy, while radio listeners believed Nixon the victor.”

But as I point out in the new edition of Getting It Wrong, the notion of viewer-listener disagreement is “a dubious bit of political lore” often cited as presumptive “evidence of the power of television images and the triumph of image over substance.”

The myth of viewer-listener disagreement, I also point out, “was utterly demolished” nearly 30 years ago in a scholarly journal article by David L. Vancil and Sue D. Pendell.

Vancil and Pendell, writing in Central States Speech Journal, reviewed and dissected the few published surveys that hinted at a viewer-listener disconnect in the Kennedy-Nixon debate of September 26, 1960.

Central to the claim that radio audiences believed Nixon won the debate was a survey conducted by Sindlinger & Company. The Sindlinger survey indicated that radio listeners thought Nixon had prevailed in the debate, by a margin of 2-to-1.

Vancil and Pendell pointed out that the Sindlinger survey included more than 2,100 respondents — just 282 of whom said they had listened on radio. Of that number, 178 (or fewer than four people per state) “expressed an opinion on the debate winner,” they wrote. The sub-sample was decidedly too small few and unrepresentative to permit meaningful generalizations or conclusions, Vancil and Pendell noted.

Not only was it unrepresentative, the sub-sample failed to identify from where the radio listeners were drawn. “A location bias in the radio sample,” Vancil and Pendell wrote, “could have caused dramatic effects on the selection of a debate winner. A rural bias, quite possible because of the relatively limited access of rural areas to television in 1960, would have favored Nixon.”

Those and other defects render the Sindlinger survey meaningless in offering insights to reactions of radio listeners.

In the second edition of Getting It Wrong, I seek to build upon the work of Vancil and Pendell, offering contemporaneous evidence from a detailed review of debate-related content in three dozen large-city U.S. daily newspapers. Examining the news reports and commentaries published in those newspapers in the debate’s immediate aftermath turned up no evidence to support the notion of viewer-listener disagreement, I write, adding:

“None of the scores of newspaper articles, editorials, and commentaries [examined] made specific reference” to the supposed phenomenon of viewer-listener disagreement. “Leading American newspapers in late September 1960 spoke of nothing that suggested or intimated pervasive differences in how television viewers and radio listeners reacted to the landmark debate.”

And they were well-positioned to have done so, given the keen interest in, and close reporting about, the first debate between major party candidates.

The second edition includes a new preface, and three new chapters that discuss:

The myth of the first televised presidential debate in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon — notably that television viewers and radio listeners reached dramatically different conclusions about who won the encounter. In Getting It Wrong, I characterize the notion of viewer-listener disagreement as “a robust trope” that’s often cited as “conclusive evidence of the power of television images and the triumph of image over substance.” I also present reasons why the debate of September 26, 1960, was at best a small factor in the outcome of the election, which Kennedy narrowly won.

The myths of the “Napalm Girl” photograph, taken in Vietnam in June 1972, which shows a cluster of children burned or terrorized by an errant napalm attack. I note the photograph has given rise to a variety of media myths — notably that American warplanes dropped the napalm. The attack was carried out by the South Vietnamese Air Force. Related myths are that the photograph was so powerful that it turned U.S. public opinion against the war, that it hastened an end to the war, and that it was published on newspaper front pages across the country. (Many leading U.S. daily newspapers did publish the photograph; many abstained.)

The spread of bogus quotations via social media and the Internet. Among the examples discussed in the new edition is this phony quotation, attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Some of my finest hours have been spent on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see.” The utterance, I point out, is found in none of Jefferson’s writings. And there is no evidence the third U.S. president smoked hemp or other substances, including tobacco. Even so, the obviously preposterous quote — like many others attributed to important men and women of the past — “is too alluring and oddly amusing to drift away as so much historical rubbish,” I write.

The second edition of Getting It Wrong also explores the tenacity of prominent media myths, calling attention to the roles of celebrities and luminaries — authors, entertainers, and social critics, as well as politicians and talk show hosts — in amplifying dubious or apocryphal tales about the news media and their power.

The upshot of the celebrity effect, I write, is scarcely trivial: The prominence of luminaries helps ensure that the myths will reach wide audiences, making the myths all the more difficult to uproot. The importance of the celebrity effect in the diffusion of media myths has become better recognized, and better documented, in the years since publication in 2010 of the first edition of Getting It Wrong, I point out.

I further note that for journalists, media myths “are very seductive: They place the news media at the epicenter of vital and decisive moments of the past, they tell of journalistic bravado and triumph, and they offer memorable if simplistic narratives that are central to journalism’s amour propre.

“They also encourage an assumption that, the disruption and retrenchment in their field notwithstanding, journalists can be moved to such heights again.”